Since online social networks are full of geeks like us anyway, let's come right
out and admit it! Find your favorite part of the pretty fractal landscape
known as the Mandelbrot Set with
our nifty whizbang Java applet, then click the Click to Share button
to add your discovery for others to enjoy. Hey, it's social! Sorry, there's
no provision for spelling out your dating preferences.

What is the Mandelbrot Set?
It's a fractal! It's an interative function! It's really cool-looking!
It's... something those of us who played with computers in the late
eighties and early nineties spent a lot of time staring at. To learn
more, check out the excellent
introduction to the Mandelbrot
Set by David Dewey.

Why is this page called Fracster? It's a little joke
at the expense of online social networking sites like
Friendster and
Orkut.

What has changed?
If you wait long enough, a super-high-quality
antialiased picture is calculated. You may zoom in
on any square region by dragging the mouse. You can now click many
times quickly; the calculation is interrupted immediately.
You now have the option of more iterations, and this is saved with your
discovery so that other people see what you see. There have been
yet more speed improvements. Code changes were made that should make it
behave better on low-memory machines running dodgy Java VMs. The locations
of other people's nifty discoveries are now marked with an X. They are also
outlined when you zoom in far enough, and labeled with a name and finally a title when you
zoom in on them all the way. Compatible with Microsoft's
Java VM. The algorithm now continues
for 200 iterations by default, and I scale the available colors to cover the range
of iterations present in the image.